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When Living at All Is the Best Revenge

“I’M going to get a cigarette,” the actress Natasha Lyonne said by way of greeting. “Do you want to go on the roof?”

One minute later she was puffing away on a Marlboro Light, looking down at the gaudy neon ravine of West 42nd Street. “I usually smoke Marlboro 72’s,” she said in a husky voice that has been seasoned by tobacco since she was a teenager. “They’re shorter. Like something Robert Mitchum would smoke.”

The scene was in keeping with the wild-child reputation Ms. Lyonne, 28, has fostered over the past few years, a period that has included stays in jail, the hospital and rehab. But Ms. Lyonne wasn’t being bad. She’d just finished rehearsing for the New Group production of Mike Leigh’s play “Two Thousand Years,” which will begin previews at the Acorn Theater on Jan. 15.

While many film actors have used stage time to jump-start a stalled career, Ms. Lyonne’s involvement in “Two Thousand Years” is not as opportunistic as it might first seem. A longtime Leigh fan, she auditioned in 2002 for his “Smelling a Rat,” directed by the New Group’s artistic director, Scott Elliott. Mr. Elliott didn’t cast her, but remembered the audition.

Then last spring, Chloë Sevigny, who is a New Group veteran and a friend of Ms. Lyonne’s, suggested he cast Ms. Lyonne in “Two Thousand Years,” a family drama that traffics heavily in modern Jewish themes, both cultural and political. “I told him that not only do I think she’s a great actress, but she lived in Israel and has strong opinions about the subject matter,” Ms. Sevigny said. Ms. Lyonne flew in from Los Angeles to meet Mr. Elliott and won the role almost immediately.

The play will be Ms. Lyonne’s first legitimate stage credit, and its timing is serendipitous. “My life is very much in the present today,” she said. “And that’s what theater is all about.”

It is a surprise to Ms. Lyonne as much as anyone that she is working at all. Or living, for that matter. After establishing herself in the late 1990s as a talented and refreshingly unorthodox presence in independent films like “The Slums of Beverly Hills” and “But I’m a Cheerleader,” her press coverage shifted to the gossip pages and stayed there. In August 2001 she was arrested in Miami Beach on charges of driving under the influence of alcohol. Three years later, while occupying a Manhattan apartment rented to her by the actor Michael Rapaport, she was again arrested, this time for threatening her neighbor and the neighbor’s dog. Mr. Rapaport evicted her in early 2005, then wrote a damning account of the experience in Jane magazine, detailing Ms. Lyonne’s abusive conduct and unhealthy way of life. She later missed several court dates, causing a warrant to be issued for her arrest.

Photo

Natasha Lyonne at a break in rehearsals for Two Thousand Years, a family drama by Mike Leigh. Previews start Jan. 15.Credit
Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Matters reached their nadir in the summer of 2005 when she checked into Beth Israel Hospital in New York and was put in the intensive care unit with a host of ailments, including hepatitis C. She remained in the hospital for five months.

“I remember being in pain a lot,” said Ms. Lyonne, who says she doesn’t recall much about her stay in the hospital. “I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, could hardly talk, could barely walk.”

Ms. Lyonne has certain romantic mannerisms, like using the word opiates when discussing her drug use. But she’s frank about the self-destructive impulses that gripped her in the past. “It definitely felt like I was on a mission, and working was not high on my priority list. I just did not foresee myself being an actress when all was said and done.”

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She started her two-decade career when she was barely school age, the child of an Orthodox Jewish family who found herself on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” “I was kind of put into this business by my family, by my mother. To be fair, I think she thought it was the right thing, and I definitely responded to it. I was an outgoing child. But I don’t know if it was something I would have done by choice.”

Ms. Lyonne has lived on her own since she was 16 and isn’t in close touch with either of her parents, who divorced when she was young. “I’d love to say that there’s been this great 180 and happy ever after,” she said. “It’s not like I have some really crazy family stuff. I’m just somebody who has distanced myself without condemnation or resentment.”

Her darkest days came to an end in December 2006, when, accompanied by a counselor from the Caron Foundation, a drug and alcohol treatment center, she finally appeared in court to face the 2004 charges. A judge sentenced her to a conditional discharge, based on her staying out of trouble for six months. Since then she has completed roles in four films.

“I’ve always been both sides of the coin,” she said. “I’m very full of life, but at the same time very dismissive of it. Not really highs and lows, just a steady state of ‘Oh, hey, isn’t this great?’ and ‘Who gives a damn anyway?’”

These days, however, she trying to give more of a damn. “I took it about as far as I could,” she said with finality. “And I didn’t die, so I decided to live, basically. Obviously it’s complicated, but it’s also very simple. I wasn’t dead at 27, so I might as well be 30. You’re already in it. You may as well be in a rocking chair some day eating a lobster club.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: When Living at All Is the Best Revenge. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe